Businesses hope leaves bring tourists

NEW PALTZ — Here's to the lowly leaf, whose yearly arrival we pray for and whose later demise is a splendor to behold and money in the bank for New Paltz and other such towns.

BY JEREMIAH HORRIGAN

NEW PALTZ — Here's to the lowly leaf, whose yearly arrival we pray for and whose later demise is a splendor to behold and money in the bank for New Paltz and other such towns.

Before New Paltz's streets and roads are clogged with the autumnal fallout, its streets are usually fill with leaf-peepers, mostly city folk who yearn to see what dying leaves on trees look like when they're all ganged together on a mountainside. Where they come from, trees are lonely outposts for grateful dogs.

The leaves always fall and they're always full of color. But for folks such as Joyce Minard, the quality of the landscape isn't the question; the question that always presents itself at the beginning of the season is, "Will it be a dry one or a wet one?"

Minard, president of the New Paltz Chamber of Commerce, has had enough of the wet one that was this summer. She estimates that a soggy summer — especially rain-soaked weekends — cost businesses in town 20 percent of their business from the previous summer. Retail, she said, was hit especially hard.

The tourism that feeds those local businesses is critical to the community's tax base — it's the town's biggest business, and autumn is its most important season.

"The colors really bring people out and even though it's a shorter day, there's all kinds of activities associated with it — pumpkins, farm stands and especially the wineries."

Too much rain in upcoming days will also dampen the intensity of the landscape's autumn palette. The best conditions anyone can hope for, color-wise, are warm, sunny days and cool, crisp but not freezing nights.

Foliage spotters are predicting a 35 percent color change by the weekend in Ulster County's highlands, as those cool nights are beginning to have their desired effect. Expect bright yellows, pale orange, with hints of red. Sullivan County is starting to blossom with shades of amber and gold and a sprinkling of burnished red leaves of average brilliance. The colors work their way south and east to the city and Long Island before they fade in late October or early November.

Today, by the way, is the first official day of autumn. So let the dying begin, let the peepers arrive and let the leaves fall where and as they may.

To learn more, go to http://fallgetaways.iloveny.com/foliage_report.html